Let’s Make It Smart To Be Smart

Because Right Now, It Totally Isn’t

Photo by David Matos on Unsplash

I am a child of the 80s. I am a female child of the 80s. Of small-town America. A town where, after graduation, the majority of the kids were headed for either their family farm or the local factory. Attending a D-1 University was extremely rare, and attending an R-1 University was unheard of.

It was a Pennsylvania town, so when one of my brother’s classmates, four years older than me, was admitted to “U Penn,” literally everyone thought it was “Penn State.” Those are very, very different universities. U Penn is The University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, and is an Ivy League School comprised of four undergraduate colleges and twelve graduate schools. Penn State is a land grant university in central Pennsylvania currently best known for its football program and pedophilia scandal.

My mother was a teacher at my high school. She was a well-respected English teacher whose specialty was American Literature, but she, like the other teachers in the department, taught spelling, vocabulary, and composition along with Lit. Because I was a teacher’s kid, the academic expectation was a bit higher than the kids who would inherit their parents’ farms. I’d be going off to college. But even so, coming from that small town, hardly anyone thought to set the bar high. State schools. Small…